Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:09:19.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF SECESSION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Brian Schoen
Brian Schoen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Ohio University: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Economic analyses of American Civil War causation typically focus on longue durée structural arguments neglecting specific context and contemporary observers’ predictions about disunion’s effects. This article suggests secession heightened concern about government solvency and intensified a conversation about the nature of American inter- and intra-national trade, one hinging on ideas about relative dependence and positioning within the world economy. Deep South secessionists rested their claims on a cotton-centric economic worldview, trusting that their coveted commodity could finance independence and attract foreign partners. Pro-compromise northerners greatly feared that possibility. Less compromising Republican political economists countered that secession would reveal northern economic superiority and the South’s underlying weakness, eventually leading to voluntary reunion. Though competing sides envisioned peaceful pathways towards their ends, the actions of insolvent central governments—who feared that any compromise on contested forts and revenue ports would undermine the confidence of underwriters—militated against these imagined peaceful ends.

Type
Symposium: American Political Economy From the Age of Jackson to the Civil War
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 203 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Albion, Robert G. 1939. The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Google Scholar
Ashworth, John. 2012. The Republic in Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayers, Edward L. 2005. What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on The South and Southern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Baptist, Edward E. 2010. “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, and Securitized Human Beings.” Common-Place 10 (3). http://www.common-place.org/vol-10/no-03/baptist/. accessed November 13, 2014.Google Scholar
Bankers’ Magazine 15 (1860): 481, 417–421. ` CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, L. Diane, Schoen, Brian, and Towers, Frank. 2011. The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Basler, Roy, ed. 1953. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Beard, Charles A., and Beard, Mary R.. 1921. History of the United States. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Beckert, Sven. 2001. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckert, Sven. 2004. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War.” The American Historical Review 109 (5): 1405–1438.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckert, Sven. 2014. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard Franklin. 1990. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bernath, Michael T. 2013. “The Confederacy as a Moment of Possibility.” The Journal of Southern History 79 (2): 299–328.Google Scholar
Bruchey, Stuart. 1967. Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy: 1790–1860: Sources and Readings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.Google Scholar
Carey, Henry C. 1848. The Past, the Present, and the Future. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart.Google Scholar
Carey, Henry C. February 15, 1861a. “The Tariff.” Boston Daily Advertiser.Google Scholar
[ Carey, Henry Charles.] 1861b. “American Civil War: Correspondence with Mr. H. C. Carey of Philadelphia, “reprinted from the Philadelphia North American and London Daily News, August-September, 1861. [London] [PS1].Google Scholar
Chittenden, Lucius E. 1893. Personal Reminiscences, 1840–1890. Richmond: Croscup.Google Scholar
Colwell, Stephen. 1861. The Five Cotton States and New York; or Remarks upon the Social and Economic Aspects of the Southern Political Crisis. (n.p.) https://archive.org/details/fivecottonstaten00colw. accessed August 22, 2011.Google Scholar
Davis, William C. 1994. “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Deyle, Steven. 2005. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in America. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dix, John A. (John Adams), and Dix, Morgan. 1883. Memoirs of John Adams Dix. Volume 2. New York: Harper & Bros. http://archive.org/details/memoirsofjohnada02dixj. accessed May 15, 2013.Google Scholar
Edling, Max M. 2014. A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egnal, Marc. 2009. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Fermer, Douglas. 1986. James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald. New York: The Boydell Press.Google Scholar
Flaherty, Jane. 2009. “‘The Exhausted Condition of the Treasury’ on the Eve of the Civil War.” Civil War History 55 (2): 244–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1971. Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Philip S. 1941. Business & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Genovese, Eugene D.. 1983. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Garnett, [R. M.]. 1855. “The South and the Union.” In DeBow’s Review 18 (2): 145–154; 18 (3): 289–297; 18 (4): 433–445; 18 (5): 559a-568; 18 (6): 681–690. Previously published as The Union, Past and Future (1850).Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D. 1965. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Gudmestad, Robert. 2011. Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Hacker, Louis. 1947. The Triumph of American Capitalism: The Development of Forces in American History to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Second edition. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Hammond, Bray. 1970. Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Bank and Politics in the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hammond, James H. [1858] 1866. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina. New York: John F. Trow & Co.Google Scholar
Huston, James L. 1987. The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Joseph. 1861. Agricultural Resources of Georgia: Address before the Cotton Planters’ Convention of Georgia at Macon, December 13, 1860. Augusta: Steam Press of Chronicle & Sentinel.Google Scholar
Kettell, Thomas Prentice. [1860] 1965. Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. Edited by Green, Fletcher. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Kettell, Thomas Prentice. 1866. History of the War of Rebellion. From Official Sources. Hartford, Cincinnati: L. Stebbins, F. A. Howe.Google Scholar
Lawson, Melinda. 2002. Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Lepler, Jessica M. 2013. The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magness, Phillip W. 2009. “Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff, 1858–1861.” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2): 287–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majewski, John D. 2009. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marler, Scott P. 2008. “‘An Abiding Faith in Cotton’: The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862.” Civil War History 54 (3): 247–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marler, Scott P. 2013. The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Russell. 2008. Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McPherson, James. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Meardon, Stephen. 2011. “Reciprocity and Henry C. Carey’s Traverses on 'The Road to Perfect Freedom of Trade.'” Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 33 (3): 307–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, Sharon Ann. 2005. “Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South.” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (4): 615–652.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Margaret G. 1970. A Financial History of the United States. New York: Columbus University Press.Google Scholar
New York Chamber of Commerce. 1861. Annual Report of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, for the Year 1860–61. New York: John Amerman.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Thomas H. 1968. Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Google Scholar
Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood, and Onuf, Peter S.. 2006. Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Owsley, Frank L. 1931. King Cotton Diplomacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Palen, Marc-William. 2013. “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (1): 35–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patterson, Robert T. 1952. “Government Finance on the Eve of the Civil War.” The Journal of Economic History 12 (1): 35–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkins, Howard, and American Historical Association. [1942] 1964. Northern Editorials on Secession. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.Google Scholar
Persky, Joseph. 1992. The Burden of Dependency: Colonial Themes in Southern Economic Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Samuel. 1861. Notes on Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. Philadelphia: G. Sherman & Son.Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger. 1989. Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Heather Cox. 1997. The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rockman, Seth. 2009. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoen, Brian. 2005. “Alternatives to Dependence: The Lower South’s Antebellum Persuit of Sectional Development through Global Interdependence.” In Delfino, Susanna and Gillespie, Michele, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, pp. 50–75.Google Scholar
Schoen, Brian. 2009. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoen, Brian. 2015. “The Statecraft of Secession and War: How Foreign Powers Unintentionally Shaped the Start of War.” In Stearns, Peter, ed., The Global Civil War. Richmond: Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, pp. 16–26.Google Scholar
Schweikart, Larry. 1987. Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Seward, William. [1858] 1906. “The Irrepressible Conflict.” In Bryan, William Jennings, ed., The World’s Famous Orations. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. New York: Bartleby.com, 2003, www.bartleby.com/268/. accessed November 11, 2014.Google Scholar
Sexton, Jay. 2005. Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, George Winston. 1951. Henry C. Carey and American Sectional Conflict. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Smith, George Winston., and Judah, Charles, eds. 1966. Life in the North During the Civil War: A Source History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Mark M. 1998. Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stampp, Kenneth. [1950] 1970. And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861. Baton Route: Louisiana State University.Google Scholar
Tadman, Michael. 1989. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
“The Panic of 1860.” New York Herald . November 14, 1861. http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/civilwar/2010/11/14/the-panic-of-1860/. accessed May 16, 2013.Google Scholar
“THE SECESSION MOVEMENT; The Policy of the Administration Again Discussed by the Cabinet. NO DEFINITE CONCLUSION ARRIVED AT.” The New York Times , November 22, 1860.Google Scholar
Thornton, Mark, and Ekelund, Robert B.. 2004. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.Google Scholar
Towers, Frank. 2011. “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861–2011.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2): 237–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodman, Harold D. 1968. King Cotton & His Retainers: Financing & Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Woods, Michael E. 2012. “What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature.” Journal of American History 99 (2): 415–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar